How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism + The National Guard Sent to Los Angeles
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Why are young men increasingly drawn to fascist ideologies—and what can parents do about it?
Brad sits down with Craig A. Johnson, author of How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. They explore why boys and young men are especially vulnerable to far-right radicalization, how fascism is becoming normalized in modern culture, and what parents can do to push back.
Craig breaks down the recruitment tactics used in online spaces, the role of toxic masculinity, and the emotional and social factors that make fascist narratives appealing. He shares practical advice for having empathetic, non-alarmist conversations with sons, as well as the importance of early intervention, positive role models, and media literacy.
This episode is essential listening for parents, educators, and anyone concerned about the rise of fascism—and how to fight it from the ground up.
How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism
Fifteen Minutes of Fascism
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Axis Mundi www.feyyaz.tv Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I'm joined today by a first-time guest, someone who I just found out lives close to me, at least for the time being, and that is Craig A. Johnson.
So, Craig, thanks for being here.
Absolutely.
Glad to be here.
Glad to talk.
You've written just an amazing book.
I'm not sure there's a more timely book I've come across.
I mean, there are so many good books out, but this is really great stuff.
You've written a book called How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
This is, like, basically another form of the talk, but instead of The Birds and the Bees.
It's talking to your son about fascism.
There's so many great aspects of this.
I want to thank Sam Kang for helping me with research for this episode.
And I just want to start here with this.
What was the impetus for this?
I think I have an inkling of the background here, the pretext, but what made this the project to do in this moment?
Yeah, like a lot of folks who study the right wing or study fascism or who pay attention to it or your friends know that you're the guy who knows about this stuff.
Whenever I tell people that I study fascism, what ends up happening is that they might ask a couple questions about the particular academic thing that I do, but ultimately, at a bar or at a party or at the bus stop, people just look at me stricken and are like, what am I supposed to do?
What do I actually do to fight fascism?
And I realized that there's a lot of good guides about how to deal with fascism in your politics.
There's all sorts of folks that I might suggest.
Shane Burley has a lot of really great stuff about this, for example.
But I realized that there wasn't really a good guide to how to deal with it in your personal life.
And this was something that I encountered a little bit teaching, teaching undergraduates.
But it's also something that I know lots of friends and folks who are educators or who are parents of young kids.
They talk about being worried about this stuff, and there really isn't a good set of resources about it, and I decided to set about making it.
The metaphor that you gave of, quote-unquote, the talk, that is how I thought about this, that's how I presented it, is in the same way that if you had a white kid, you might sit down and be like, hey, we need to have a talk about racism and structural racism and how to engage with classmates who aren't white and how their lives are different.
In the same way that you would need to sit down and talk to a cis male son and be like, hey, here's how rape culture works.
Here are the pressures that your friends might be putting on you.
Here are the narratives that culture is showing you.
Here are different and better ways to behave.
In exactly those same ways, there needs to be a guide that's accessible for parents and educators and anybody else to just be like, okay, here's this other messaging you're going to be getting about...
Yeah, I really appreciate that.
And the ways that we frame the talk in this country demands a whole podcast episode, the ways that young black men have talks with their parents about the police and what to do when they're approached by the police.
And the ways young, those who are assigned the female sex at birth, those who identify as women and girls and so on, there's talks that are happening there.
And yet, it's often white men who just, oh, they don't need to talk because society's built for them, right?
What do you need to talk to them about?
And yet, fascism is a uniquely, it's a unique threat to young men, but especially young white men.
I think so many of our listeners are super well informed.
Have a very good conception of it.
I'm happy if you want to jump in and you're like, nope, we have to do it.
Feel free.
I'm not dipping back into that.
I don't feel the responsibility for us to outline our very particular and very correct definition of fascism.
I'd rather spend time on some things that I think people feel are important in the ways you outlined.
How do I do something about this in my own family, in my own relationships?
One of the things, though, that is really great about your book is that you point out early on that it seems like fascism is now a normal part of our society or that fascism is just normal in the sense that there's something normy about it that doesn't require one to sign up in a kind of neo-Nazi group or online forum, etc.
What does it mean that fascism is normal?
That's a much more fun question to answer and ask, so thank you so much.
I think that you're right on both counts, that fascism is normal, both in the historical sense, in that it's just part of how the world works.
Since fascism came into existence for the first time back in the 1920s under Mussolini, there have been small fascist organizations in basically every developed country continuously.
Sometimes they take power over the government, but that's pretty rare.
In this sense, you know, fascism just needs to be thought of as being exactly as normal to the modern world and to modern politics as communism is or socialism.
Every developed country has a small or a big communist party or organization.
They've just had it since the 19th century.
They're probably not going to go away.
Fascism is the same.
The other thing is, I think that's a more insightful comment, is that fascism is just normal now in that the ideas of fascism have crept into and been spread around normative culture, especially in the United States, but also in a lot of Northern and Western Europe.
So the UK, Germany, to a lesser extent France, but definitely in Italy, places like Spain and Portugal, Romania.
Poland, like all of these countries have big fascist or extremely right-wing political organizations.
I mean, like the governing party of Italy is descended from a fascist party.
The prime minister of Italy was in what was essentially a like fascist youth league when she was a kid.
I mean, this is just mainstream now.
It's just normal.
And so there's a way in which like a lot of what That's just what kids talk about in school all the time now.
Like, that language, that way of thinking about the world, those online right-wing extremists that I heard about when I was starting to study fascism, starting to look into it in a wider sense.
That stuff that creeped me out and I would tell people about it and they'd be like, oh my god, weird, gross, strange little people.
But now it's just, that's just TikTok.
That's just Instagram.
Those ideas are just so pervasive and normal now.
What makes it, so it is normal and it's normal for a lot of reasons and I think we could, people need to read your book and they can get a wider picture here.
We could probably talk for three hours about why and how it's become normal, right?
By way of internet culture, by way of...
But I think a question that people are going to have if they are trying to talk to someone in their family, a young man, a teenage boy, is why it's alluring.
What does this appeal to?
Because I'm with you.
I'm confident I'm older than you.
I came of age in the 90s.
I remember when we saw materials from the far right, even growing up in Southern California in a place where there was some history of that.
And it did feel weird.
American History X, when I watched that film with Edward Norton, it felt like those guys were weird.
Like, I didn't want to be those.
There was nothing, like, and even me as a mixed race person, there was nothing in the white boys on my basketball team that I felt like, hey, I think they secretly want to be the dudes from the Ed Norton film.
So we could talk about what and how has made it normal, and if you want to pontificate on that, please go for it.
But I'm also interested in what's so alluring about it to the 16-year-old man, the 16-year-old boy, 19-year-old man, 21-year-old man in this current moment.
Yeah, I mean, I think that fascism and the extreme right in general are alluring to young men, period.
I think that is their primary site of recruitment.
It's that and older middle-aged men.
Older middle-aged men who get into fascism, usually that's by being a veteran or by being a cop or by being associated with those kinds of cultures.
A good old boy, your uncle who works at some plant that got shut down and he blames it on the globalists, like that kind of thing.
That's a pipeline to fascism.
For young people, the pipeline to fascism is different, but it's in many ways more historic.
Like, fascism was always a young people's movement.
It was created by and for veterans of World War I, young men who experienced something horrific and considered themselves to have been It's about power.
It's about speed.
It's about dominance.
It's about feeling.
It's about poetry.
It's about will.
Fascism is not about reading books.
Fascism is not about treatises.
It's not about theses.
It's not about ideas.
It's about feelings.
And so in that sense, it just is appealing to a teenager or to a young man who is just, I want to just cut through all of this crap and get to the truth of the matter.
Anybody who feels that way, fascism has an on-ramp for you.
But there's a separate reason.
And so that's why, like, fascism is appealing to young people in general all the time.
That's why there's always a small, simmering group.
Like you said, back in the 90s in Orange County, yeah, there were, like, small groups of skinheads.
There were small groups of skinheads everywhere.
There were young people who were drawn to a subculture.
But why did that subculture balloon into a mainstream culture today?
And why is it happening everywhere?
I think that there is a pretty clear answer.
And it is that the world is worse for young people.
Or at the very least, their perception is that the world is worse for them.
And there's parts of that that are correct and parts of it that are delusion.
The parts that are correct are that, like, imagine a young person today, somebody who's 16 years old.
They know.
They know that they will inherit a planet, a world, an economy, a society that is worse for them.
Yeah.
than the planet, the world, the economy that their parents, their grandparents had.
This is specifically and uniquely true for white kids or for kids who are of the majority ethnic or political or religious group in whatever country they're in, right?
They know that they will be relatively less powerful than their parents or their grandparents.
There are some ways in which that is unequivocally true, like their wages will be worse, the climate will be worse, etc.
And there are some ways in which it's I am very much on the side of and a feminist and anti-racist, et cetera.
And it remains the case that when, when you're dealing with a young person who does not experience himself to be privileged because he's a child, right?
He's a minor.
He doesn't get to pick where he lives or what he eats or what school he goes to.
He considers his life to be unfree.
And so when you tell him, Hey, you are a member of an oppressive group.
You are privileged and their, We want to center their experiences.
He feels and experiences oppression.
Now, that's delusional, right?
That is not oppression.
That's egalitarianism.
That's equality.
You know, that's reparations.
But to a 16-year-old mind, to a 21-year-old mind, to a 25-year-old mind, like he just experiences it as deprivation.
He just looks and says, okay, so not only is it going to be a worse planet, I'm not even going to get...
He's not even going to be on top of the oppressed class.
Instead, he is losing power.
That's how he probably is primed to experience it.
And that's not just because of, you know, part of that is because of biochemistry.
Like, young brains are worse at discerning long-term patterns and, like, systemic patterns.
They're simply not as good at it as adult brains are.
But it's also the case that the Republican Party, conservative parties throughout the world have bought in fully to this narrative of emasculation, of deprivation for men.
That's the messaging that men see.
That's the messaging that they get.
And the left's answers, while very clearly, objectively better, are a harder sell for young men.
Because, you know, what they're saying to them is, hey, you need to be less powerful.
And to a 16-year-old who does not experience himself as ever having had power, he just sees that as loss.
You're bringing me back, listening to you, I'm just thinking through those stages of being a young person, being a teenager, being 25, 26, and feeling like you have so much to prove in the world.
You need to become somebody.
You need to find your niche where you are good, powerful, praised, where people look up to you.
You're trying to find your spot in the world.
All of us are.
And the way you explain it, I think, is really helpful.
That what is in the bigger picture, egalitarian, feels to some like deprivation.
I want to get quickly to how they recruit.
Young men to fascism and what to do about it.
I just want to ask you one more question, though, in between, and we don't have to take a long time on it.
But you've mentioned masculinity.
I think you've touched on it, but I'd love to just target it.
What does this particular age with Instagram and social media and TikTok and the ways that body shaming and we live on screen now?
What has that done to the young male brain and their perception of themselves?
You mentioned in the book the incel movement is a real problem, or at least responding to a real crisis.
Where's masculinity for the 16-year-old come into this allure of fascism in 2025?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of discourse around the fragility of masculinity, and I think that broadly people have hit the nail on the head when it comes to that.
And when people talk about masculine fragility, usually they mean that men get upset about so-called attacks on masculinity.
But I think that the more prescient take, this is not my take, this is from other folks, is that masculinity itself, the gender, is fragile.
It is true that in the 20th century, there has been more space developed for what it can mean to be a woman.
This is good.
This is unequivocally a good thing.
It also remains the case that masculinity is a much more bounded space in many ways.
It is a privileged space, but it is a bounded space.
There are not that many ways to be a man in a traditional sense, which is what a lot of young people are going for.
That's a lot of what they are looking for.
There are not a lot of ways to be a man that are traditionally viable, especially if you consider that like...
It's about control over the family.
And if a person cannot make enough money in order to support a family, and they no longer have control over their family, then what does it mean to be a man?
This is the question that a lot of young people are asking themselves.
This is the question that is being asked of them.
What does it mean?
And so the answer that fascism gives is, We can return, we can go back to a time when men were in control over their families.
We can go back to a time when men worked with their hands and brought home the bacon and came home covered in soot.
And there was a hot dinner waiting on the stove.
As if that were a better time.
Or as if all the good things about it didn't come from unions, which they did.
But they imagine this as this prehistoric perfection.
When in reality, that kind of family structure and social organization existed for maybe 25 years after World War II and into the 1970s and pretty much only in the more developed parts of the United States and only for white people and only for cisgender people and only for heterosexual people, et cetera, et cetera.
Masculinity is just fragile.
It seems like there's a desire, too, to return to a time when the sexual capital was perceived to be on the side of men.
So, you know, in that system, if a man cheats or if a man has sex before marriage or if It doesn't ruin him socially.
And in fact, it's the woman who has to protect her social status by way of, quote-unquote, protecting her sexuality and her sex life.
It seems to me that the young man today perceives all of the sexual power and capital to be with women.
That is the perception, definitely.
They have options.
They can sleep with whoever they want.
They have the chance to have a sex life.
And here I am, a 16-year-old boy with no muscles and no chest hair and no money.
And I have nothing.
I don't have any way to do any of that.
Is that part of the equation?
Yes, yes.
Young men today, and a lot of this comes from online messaging, which we can get to in a second more.
Online messaging at young men about their sexuality, by and large, is about how much work it takes in order to get anybody to be interested in you sexually or romantically.
The assumption that they present to young men, and they present it to them because it That's what it's for.
But the claim is that, oh, yeah, it's easy for women to get what they want.
To get what you want, you need to lift five times a week and take creatine and maybe you should think about taking steroids and you got to wake up at 5 a.m. every day and dunk your head in a nice cold bucket of water and firm up your face and blah, blah, blah.
This particular variant is no longer the dominant one, but back in the 2010s, the dominant version of this narrative was pickup artistry, quote-unquote.
The idea was that you could turn the tables and women are manipulating the quote-unquote sexual marketplace because that's the narrative that they have.
Women are supposedly manipulating this supposed sexual marketplace.
And so they were saying, here are all the tricks that you can use to manipulate the quote-unquote sexual marketplace.
Instead of them being the con artist, you can pull one over.
And this transactional, confrontational, con artist perspective on sexuality, as opposed to thinking about sexuality and romance as being something that two people or more people decide to do because they want to.
Which is a much simpler and kinder and more beautiful definition.
Or any idea of, like, intimacy or reciprocity, anything of these nature, right?
No, no.
Yeah.
It is not about pleasure.
It's not about love.
Yeah.
Young people describe sex as a smash.
Did you smash?
And then they talk about a body count, right?
Which is how many kills do you have, in essence?
You're right.
It's almost video game language.
All right.
What are the gateways?
You describe, I think, in really great ways, the gateways that young men are brought into the fascist sort of mediascape.
What are those?
Yeah.
So there's several.
And yeah, you're right.
The book goes into a couple examples of this.
Some of the biggest ones are the one that we've been talking about.
Just now, sort of dating advice, quote-unquote, and also fitness and bodybuilding advice, which are based—that Venn diagram is almost a circle at this point.
Why would you want to bodybuild in order to date people?
How do you date people?
Let's buy bodybuilding, right?
But that's the sort of answer here currently.
So a lot of that content becomes fascist content.
So, like, an example would be, let's say that you are looking up a video about how to— Deadlift or bench press better.
You look that up and, oh, you see this influencer and he is showing you good bench press form.
Okay, fine.
Now your YouTube algorithm is, oh, maybe you want to see more videos by these, like, macho guys.
And some of them are going to be talking about deadlift form.
And some of them are going to be talking about their diet or their life or their grind set or something like that, right?
And then after that, they'll start talking about...
Another different way would be if a young man saw, let's say, a video that's video game content, right?
He's just watching a stream of somebody playing a video game that he likes.
And then it turns out that he starts watching more videos by this particular streamer.
And then it turns out this streamer had a controversy, maybe a year ago, maybe a month ago, because the streamer said a slur, right?
Or the streamer did a provocative, maybe racially charged gesture.
And people are rightly condemning this person for saying a racial slur, for example.
But this young man, all that he's seen from this guy is that he's like, Suddenly, he's on his side, and he's like, oh, but they're just jokes.
Why can't people take a joke?
Wait, why can't they take a joke?
Why is it okay for people to joke about my race, but it's not okay for people to joke about other races?
Hmm.
Then he gets into conspiratorial thinking about, maybe it is white people who are really oppressed.
That's fascism, right?
Like, there are clear on-ramps for this.
And the thing is that, like, None of these paths are accidental.
These weren't stumbled into by the right-wing.
They built them on purpose.
Starting back in the 2010s, and even before that, in the aughts, there were right-wing influencers online.
For example, Anglin, the guy who founded the Daily Stormer, which is, I think, still to this day, the largest neo-Nazi website in the United States.
The Daily Stormer is, the founder is on record saying, hey, my goal?
I want to get the 10-year-olds.
I want to get the 10-year-olds on my side, because then that'll build a base, and then they'll continue to spread this stuff.
How do I get 10-year-olds?
Well, by jokes, with memes, with something that's funny.
They'll think it's funny because young people are attracted to transgressive humor, and probably just the case in the contemporary world, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that.
But they encounter this transgressive humor.
Maybe they bring it to their mom.
Maybe they bring it to a teacher.
Maybe a principal finds out about it.
Maybe their sister sees it.
And somebody says, that's not funny.
And then this kid is, I think it's funny.
Why don't they think it's funny?
Is there something wrong with them?
Is there something?
Why is it not okay for me to say this?
You know, why are people telling me what to say?
I'm the oppressed person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the thing is that, like, Anglin was successful.
He did it.
You know, those 10-year-olds that he got in 2008, 2009, they're Doge staffers now.
I mean, like, it worked.
The system worked.
So much to say.
There's so much there.
Real quick, my next question is really about what to do about this, I promise.
What about the ancient, the paleo, the we got to go back to being men who eat with our hands and act cavemen?
Because that's when...
Men used to go off to war and women used to cook.
And now look at us.
We're doing this.
How does the appeal to the ancient help here?
Yeah.
The appeal to the ancient is part of how fascism has always talked about itself.
The original fascist movement used a Roman symbol and a Roman salute.
I mean, the fascist salute is something that the fascist party in Italy appropriated from ancient history.
The fascis is an ancient Roman symbol.
It's something that exists in a lot of Western cultures.
It's actually in the United States Capitol building because it predates the fascist party.
When it comes to an appeal to the past, fascism is pretty ecumenical about it.
They'll pick whatever symbols might help them.
So yeah, they'll talk about cavemen.
They'll talk about leave it to beaver.
They'll talk about the antebellum south.
It doesn't matter.
When it comes to the specific, yeah, ancient stuff, like, actually, yeah, a lot of what they want is, like, an imagined Roman state, and they want the United States to maybe be Rome, unless you're an Italian fascist, so you want Italy to be Rome.
And you want, yeah, you want a return, return spelled with a V instead of a U, right?
Like, something stupid like that.
And, yeah, the connection to, like, paleo or cavemen, It's part of how they connect this imagined better governance and social structure with imagined better bodies as well.
So somebody like the Liver King or somebody like Joe Rogan talking about just big hulking men and that's how you be a man.
Even Bobby Kennedy.
Oh yeah.
Kennedy's a perfect example of this.
I don't know what that guy's on, crank or steroids or something, but he's on something, right?
Yeah.
How do you talk to your sons about sex and gender?
This is something that I have two little kids, sexed female.
They're young.
I don't know who and what they're going to be when they get older as they grow.
But for now, I feel this sense of it seems really natural if those kids grow up and are like, hey, I'm a little girl, I'm 10, that we're going to have a lot of talks about sex and gender.
Already at my kid's preschool, I got super upset.
My wife had to talk me down.
Because when one of my kids went from diapers to underwear, they started calling her underwear panties.
And people are like, tell me the boy version of panties.
Is there a boy version of panties that the three-year-old boys get?
Because you just gendered a piece of clothing by calling it that.
I was like, everybody in that room over there is three years old.
Just call everybody's...
But you just, and all of that to say, I imagine many chapters of talking to my kids about gender and sex, but part of that is because they are sexed female, and if they are going to be little girls, we're going to talk about it.
But it seems so like something you don't do with little boys, tween boys, teenage boys.
It just seems like something you have to be so intentional about, like so ready to put a plan in place to do as a parent.
How do you do that?
What are the ways to do it successfully?
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What are ways people can link up with you and all the further work that you're doing?
Yeah, thank you.
And also, thanks for talking, and thanks for that perspective on the book.
It's really heartening to hear people get stuff out of it.
Yeah, I'm on Blue Sky at cajohnson-craig.
My podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, which is a sort of weekly news roundup about fascist news around the world.
That's 15 Minutes of Fascism.
You can find it wherever.
And I also recently started a YouTube channel, which is also 15 Minutes of Fascism.
Although, to be honest, those are closer to 20 minutes.
I decided to keep them.
We'll forgive it.
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